Fake gold bars in Bank of England and Fort Knox

Fake gold bars in Bank of England and Fort Knox

Background
In October of 2009 the Chinese received a shipment of gold bars. Gold is regularly exchanges between countries to pay debts and to settle the
so-called balance of trade. Most gold is exchanged and stored in vaults under the supervision of a special organization based in London, the London
Bullion Market Association (or LBMA). When the shipment was received, the Chinese government asked that special tests be performed to guarantee the
purity and weight of the gold bars. In this test, four small holed are drilled into the gold bars and the metal is then analyzed.

I remember seeing the original story a couple of months or so back, which very quickly seemed to disappear and never gained any traction in the
mainstream press, unsurprisingly given the possible implications.

I know the gold issue and Fort Knox holdings has been a matter of speculation before, but of course it is not the sort of thing that your ordinary Joe
can investigate. However, if this does gain traction in the blogospere, it may percolate up to the mainstream if the word spreads.

Maybe that could be one reason there is so much oposition to audits of the FED and financial systems?

Do you have any other sources at all? I'll look for my self a little later on... I just don't know how much I can trust a site with a .pk suffix
when talking about something like that...

Very serious story if true though - very worrying. - Still at least I know how to make fake gold bars now - mental note, tungsten much cheaper than
gold, same density to 3dp it's just the wrong colour and too hard - 1/16th" coating of pure gold should sort that out

This was apparently all highly orchestrated by an extremely well financed criminal operation.

Within mere hours of this scam being identified – Chinese officials had many of the perpetrators in custody.

And here’s what the Chinese allegedly uncovered:

Roughly 15 years ago – during the Clinton Administration [think Robert Rubin, Sir Alan Greenspan and Lawrence Summers] – between 1.3 and 1.5
million 400 oz tungsten blanks were allegedly manufactured by a very high-end, sophisticated refiner in the USA [more than 16 Thousand metric tonnes].
Subsequently, 640,000 of these tungsten blanks received their gold plating and WERE shipped to Ft. Knox and remain there to this day. I know folks
who have copies of the original shipping docs with dates and exact weights of “tungsten” bars shipped to Ft. Knox. The balance of this 1.3 million
– 1.5 million 400 oz tungsten cache was also plated and then allegedly “sold” into the international market.

I actually work at the Bank of England and I worked in the Bullion section for 8 years before moving offices, trust me, the bars in our vaults ( all @
370,000 of them) are real .
I should know I've handled and weighed practically ALL of them.

There has been an issue lately were some ( mainly the old @Fed' bars were of low quality , before the LBMA said a gold bar has to look and be a gold
bar, the Feds were full of holes, some of which had sawdust in them from when they were sent here to the B of E vaults. They used to be stored in
boxes of 3 filled with sawdust, before being sent here on wooden pallets, whereas some other refiners had other issues, bobbles, bumps and cracks.
The whole lot of the Fed bars have been scanned ( due to LBMA regulations and request) and some , not all have been found to have faults ( about 30%
or so), but they had been made in the 20's and 30's , before quality control even existed.
The ONLY fake ones in the Bank of England are the ones on display in the museum 'pyramid', you can tell that if you ever get here by checking the
numbers on the bars, there are 3 sets of ranges, but about 30 bars in the display, ALL the real bars we stamp with its own unique number in a machine
that compresses the number into the bar at a pressure of 4 tonnes, if the bars were tungsten I'm pretty sure it wouldn't take the pressure and
squash or flatten the bar..

Mind you the article doesn't mention the Bank of England by name either, but for your information we ARE the second largest custodian of Bullion in
the world AFTER the Fedral Reserve in New York.?.?

I actually work at the Bank of England and I worked in the Bullion section for 8 years before moving offices, trust me, the bars in our vaults ( all @
370,000 of them) are real .
I should know I've handled and weighed practically ALL of them.

There has been an issue lately were some ( mainly the old @Fed' bars were of low quality , before the LBMA said a gold bar has to look and be a gold
bar, the Feds were full of holes, some of which had sawdust in them from when they were sent here to the B of E vaults. They used to be stored in
boxes of 3 filled with sawdust, before being sent here on wooden pallets, whereas some other refiners had other issues, bobbles, bumps and cracks.
The whole lot of the Fed bars have been scanned ( due to LBMA regulations and request) and some , not all have been found to have faults ( about 30%
or so), but they had been made in the 20's and 30's , before quality control even existed.
The ONLY fake ones in the Bank of England are the ones on display in the museum 'pyramid', you can tell that if you ever get here by checking the
numbers on the bars, there are 3 sets of ranges, but about 30 bars in the display, ALL the real bars we stamp with its own unique number in a machine
that compresses the number into the bar at a pressure of 4 tonnes, if the bars were tungsten I'm pretty sure it wouldn't take the weight and squash
or flatten the bar..

[edit on 14/1/10 by DataWraith]

Tungsten is harder than gold and less malleable. So it could take the weight and would in fact squash less than gold.

Really? Wow, small world, I worked at the BoE, Spent most of my time in KAYs during the renovations some years ago.. Hohum, interesting time and I do
beleive the gold there is real (that's just a gut feeling since I was not allowed close enough to see if I could hold one or two ;-)

Really? Wow, small world, I worked at the BoE, Spent most of my time in KAYs during the renovations some years ago.. Hohum, interesting time and I do
beleive the gold there is real (that's just a gut feeling since I was not allowed close enough to see if I could hold one or two ;-)

Sorry to derail but do you still have watchers???

Ahh the good ol' days , I remember KAY's , good restaurant and great bar, no wonder most of the staff came back from lunch drunk ( before the Bank
realised it didn't have a liquor license and couldn't legally sell alcohol

Watchers? no , we have a security force, but other than that, no watchers, watchers finished before I started , now its 'A' panel and 'B panel'
with security force authorisation to open vaults, cameras do all the watching these days.
There IS a real one in the Museum, that you can pick up, but its in a barely larger than a bar perspex box that has a hole in the side, only large
anough for your hand to go in, but the box has 'blockers' on the sides of the bar so you can't turn it round. That was because many moons ago (Bank
urban legend ) a young kid tourist asked " is it real?" to a pink guard ( The doormen wear pink jackets) and the guard said " If you can take it
out you can keep it", the kid had small fingers and managed to turn the bar around and slide it out, he got to the door before having a pang of
guilt, he handed it back and the poop hit the fan, hence the 'blockers' now.

Thanks for the info, didn't mean to derail.. Yer well you can see how long ago it was I worked there (contract PM for the premises division) my first
3 months I had my own watcher (armed guard) who watched me, even waiting outisde the toilet, which is very disconcerting (my projects were over
multiple areas of the bank, but mostly as I said in KAYs) Great job you have, the vaults are awsome

I can't imagine the gold would be fake.

Countries used the building all the time, in and out with their deposits (I assume deposits) it would be pretty hard to scam them with fake gold given
the level of footfall I saw back then. It appeard to me everyone wanted their own little tour of the buildings.

Edit to add: The issue I would have is that I do not know what use Fort Knox is put to! do people/countries actually do business in Fort knox as they
do in the BoE (at least they did in my time) is Fort Knox a gold vault or fully functioning bank? A secluded vault perhaps could get away with more
than a fully functioning bank that is under scrutiny, again I don't know the answer. But that would be my question.

I worked in the (go ahead and bash me) FRB between 78-88, There was talk even then about the purity of gold, but I also remember that all gold was
removed from Fort Knox, and placed in the FRB New York.

But who knows, if the gold was faked, and came out of the Fed, it would have been changed somewhere, so who has the real gold? And who would have the
knowlege of where and when to change it.

I actually work at the Bank of England and I worked in the Bullion section for 8 years before moving offices, trust me, the bars in our vaults ( all @
370,000 of them) are real .
I should know I've handled and weighed practically ALL of them.

There has been an issue lately were some ( mainly the old @Fed' bars were of low quality , before the LBMA said a gold bar has to look and be a gold
bar, the Feds were full of holes, some of which had sawdust in them from when they were sent here to the B of E vaults. They used to be stored in
boxes of 3 filled with sawdust, before being sent here on wooden pallets, whereas some other refiners had other issues, bobbles, bumps and cracks.
The whole lot of the Fed bars have been scanned ( due to LBMA regulations and request) and some , not all have been found to have faults ( about 30%
or so), but they had been made in the 20's and 30's , before quality control even existed.
The ONLY fake ones in the Bank of England are the ones on display in the museum 'pyramid', you can tell that if you ever get here by checking the
numbers on the bars, there are 3 sets of ranges, but about 30 bars in the display, ALL the real bars we stamp with its own unique number in a machine
that compresses the number into the bar at a pressure of 4 tonnes, if the bars were tungsten I'm pretty sure it wouldn't take the pressure and
squash or flatten the bar..

[snip]
[edit on 14/1/10 by DataWraith]

I was just about to agree but then after a bit of thought it would seam unlikely for professionally made counterfeits to be that easy to detect.You
have to think if the counterfeiters have all of the same tools to detect fakes and know how they work etc the chances for simple mistakes like this is
low.For example it would be unlikely to be thinly plated tungsten so that when you would compress your numbers it would not distort differently.
Not hard to do if its over 1/4 inch thick plating I would amuse.

Where you mention scanning is this something that would detect a tungsten core.What if the tungsten were in divided form such as small balls suspended
and of some idealized size. Could you tell us if its an ultrasound scan?
Interesting point is that I have in my collection some actual tungsten silver alloy so I suppose it might be possible with gold as well.Not sure how
this could be used to fool the type of scanning you mention but its an extra possible point to think about.

However for example a thermal or electrical conductivity test would reveal a tungsten content.
I have read about some vending machines either made or considered that were able to detect silver and could not be fooled because no other material
could match silvers room temperature electrical conductivity.Really do not remember now if they were actually used or not as I only remember reading
about them and forgot those details now.

It was ultrasound scanning they did , I'd left just as they were starting to get the equipment and training together, I couldn't see the way it was
done, but from what I DID see it measured depth and 'consistancy' of the bars, the feds ones were truly horrendous as they had huge holes, gaps and
cracks in them, not all but some.
Its possible that some of them could be , but they would have to have been fairly recent ones, and the majority of thebars in the BofE vaults have
been down there decades.
The BofE's processes haven't really changed over the years so who's to say?

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